Did you know that:

*Frisians, sailing from the North Sea, founded Athens under their matriarch, Minerva, circa 1640 BC.

*Approximately 20 years later, the Frisians migrated as far as the Punjab.

*These Frisians who traced their history from the sinking of Aldland, Atland, in 2193 BC, formed the basis of Western law and religion.

Read about this and more in The Oera Linda Book, it is the first chapter in the history of Western Civilization!

The Oera Linda Book, Frya and the Origin of Monotheism as we Know it -an English Translation

by Frank H. Pierce IV

In the year 1848, Cornelis over de Linden, master shipwright at the Royal Netherlands Dockyards at Helder, near the West Frisian island of Texel came, through his Aunt Aafjie Meylhof, into possession of a text or collection of several writings which had been in the care of his departed grandfather, Andries over de Linden. The text was written in an unusual script and Cornelis may have studied runes in hopes of deciphering it. Not a scholar himself and thus unaware of the possible import of his legacy, he waited nineteen years to present the collection to a Dr. Elco Verwijs, Archivist of the Province Friesland, who, seeing that it was written in an ancient Frisian, asked the Frisian Society, Friesch Genootschap for support in the translation and publication of the writings; it was not granted. Finally, the cause of the text, to be known as The Oera Linda Book, was taken up by a Dr. J. G. Ottema who edited, translated the work into Dutch and published it in two editions, one in 1872 and another in 1876. The accompanying transliteration of the original which appeared in the latter was used in this English translation. When this writing, consisting of chronicles, laws and doctrines came to light, near the middle of the nineteenth century, it was attacked and denounced as a fraud even by those who, according to Dr. Ottema, had not actually read it He complained that there was a movement afoot "first to halt the edition and thereafter to go against the spreading." Furthermore, Dr. Ottema also noted that: "Not only within the land, but also from abroad has one taken the field against that book, as if the well-being of land and folk depended upon the authenticity or inauthenticity thereof." Once you have read this translation, you may ask yourself then, why some are so ardently sure that the source must be a forgery. How would such a book have to appear so that they might believe it to be real?

Although nothing can ever be absolutely authenticated, one factor which could make a forgery of The Oera Linda Book is lacking, namely any sort of ambition and motivation on the part of Cornelies over de Linden. He was neither Mohammad with the Koran nor Joseph Smith with his golden tablets. He neither sought nor achieved fame, wealth or power from scripture which he himself could not even read.

The chronicler Konered oera Linda recounted how, approximately 260 years before Christ, Friso's son Adel with his bride Ifkja wandered among the Swiss Lake-dwellers who had, since the abandonment of their settlements, been unknown until 1853 when a very low water level revealed the remains of the dwellings. This would have been too late for any supposed forger. Likewise the knowledge that the West Frisian Islands were once part of the mainland came yet considerably later. The manuscript therefore clearly contains knowledge of geography which was unavailable at the time of any alleged forgery.

One must also mention the rag paper used in the text. Dr. Ottema, in the foreword to his translation, took pains to demonstrate that it was of an irregular sort used in the thirteenth century and not available in nineteenth century Holland. Furthermore, the text is full of lacunae or gaps, and a broken ending, quite befitting a document which was stored in such a damp place as Friesland, and which also make it unlikely that a forger would have been so clever as to have created an incomplete work.

Finally Dr. Ottema asked, "Who in this time could have written such a thing?" He could name only three people, Rask, Richthofen and Hettema who were even competent to write in the Old Frisian Language. Though I recognized the vocabulary from elsewhere, namely from Dutch, Low German and sundry eras of English and High German, I myself could not have produced this writing. Enough spent on the selective skeptics; if one should doubt the authenticity of The Oera Linda Book, why then believe anything which one has not experienced first hand?

The Frisians are one of the most ancient of the Indo-European nations, to have reached Europe from Iran at about 40,000 B.C., as the glaciers began to melt and expansion and settlement northwards from the Mediterranean region became possible. This group is known as the Proto-FrisoScanLa, the common ancestors of the Frisians, Scandinavians and Latins. The FrisoScanLa broke up, as a whole, somewhere in Central Europe, or perhaps in France whence some migrated to the Plains of Latium thus becoming the Latins, others moved to the Netherlands and northwestern Germany where they became the Frisians, named for Frya , the Folksmother of the White Race, and still others moved north to the Scandinavian Peninsula, after 8,000 B.C. when the melting of the glaciers permitted. The Scandinavians came under the influence of the Finns and other Arctic and Steppe's people, as we shall see; the Latins came under the Semiticising influence of the Mediterranean. Only the Frisians remained relatively unaffected by foreign cultures. These groups are alike as to skull type and the tendency to government by consent of the governed. One may also note the similarity of the Roman Vestal Virgins to the Maids of Fasta.

In her article, "The Northern Heritage of Germanic Religion," Mankind Quarterly Vol. XXIII, No, 3 & 4, Spring-Summer, 1983, Lotte Motz went to considerable length to demonstrate that the Eddic set of beliefs which, one associates with the early Teutons, originates among the Steppe's races and even the Lapps and other Arctic dwellers. What then, one may ask, was Germanic religion other than so many borrowings from foreign races? As The Oera Linda Book clearly states, it was simple monotheism. Indeed, Professor George F. Jones declared the book, "Christian and Protestant at that." Here is to be found God the Father and the Holy (Wralda's) Ghost; only the divine nature of Christ is missing. The coming of the Messiah, however, was foreseen in The Avesta, the most ancient holy book of the Aryans, Yast 19:89 as the advent of the "victorious Saoshyant (Restorer) and his helpers" who shall "restore the world, which will never grow old and never die ........when the dead shall rise, when life and immortality shall come etc." It is true that the Teutons and their kin betimes strayed into foreign heathenism but so did the Children of Israel. Like The Oera Linda Book, The Avesta also reveres Frya, Yast 13:110, 119 "We worship the soul- Fravashi of the holy Frya."

The unusual alphabet in which the text is written may be the only known example of the Greek-like script which Caesar reported to be in use by the Helvetians, B.G. I: 29 & VI: 14. The tendency of the transcribers of the thirteenth century, when the last mentioned transcription of the text was made, was to adjust old writing to make it more understandable to contemporary readers, while preserving much of the original language. This resulted in many mixed texts which contain elements of several periods. At the beginning of much vernacular writing, with a few exceptions such as Anglo-Saxon, usage was highly irregular due to the lack of printing and national academies to standardize language. Language could change radically between generations and vary considerably with dialect; writers in the vernacular wrote as they heard. It is therefore not strange that the usage of these chronicles should contain so many diverse elements from Frisian, Dutch, Low German and even High German.

It is hard to dispute the greatness of Martin Luther for German as we know it can be seen as his invention. However, he also began the idea that translation must concern itself less with preserving the exact meaning of the original and more with creating good literature in the intended language. This is a fault of the English translation, produced by William R. Sandbach, in 1876. Namely, it is too smooth. But my translation seeks to preserve the plainspoken and yet profound eloquence of these chroniclers whose sentences are often either too long or too short and full of multiple negatives. Moreover, the Sandbach text has a considerable number of mistranslations which I have noted in my foreword.

Frisian is the next of kin to English, the only other language in the Anglo-Frisian group. It is an accident of history which has paired such a small tongue, preserved only through constant struggle, of which most people are unaware, with the giant English which has become so very international, first through British and then through American world power. To read these thirteenth century Frisian writings has somewhat the same effect as the contemporary Middle English. Thus, to the English speaker, especially one with knowledge of the Germanic Languages, the texts of The Oera Linda Book are familiar territory.

The latest investigations to date, into the amount of C14 in the growth rings of the ancient Bristlecone Pine have revealed that the loss of radioactive carbon by organic matter is not constant as once thought, for some quite old rings show more C14 than had been expected. This has greatly altered the established view of antiquity. No longer can the megalithic construction in Northwestern Europe be seen as imitation of the Near Eastern models of Egypt and of Mycenae to the south; rather, the reverse may be true. Therefore Frisian technical superiority and the Frisian contribution to the foundation of Hellenic civilization is very likely even if the Frisians themselves were not part of a megalithic tomb building culture. Indeed, we see here the persons upon whom the Classical deities Minerva and Neptune are based as well as the Norse Wodin or Odin. Hence, one may wonder whether mythological characters were actually real people who became the objects of much fantasy and exaggeration in the manner of today's biografiction. This book should then be seen as the first chapter of the history of Western civilization which must be learned by all school children who study the subject. It illustrates that not all races were originally ruled by pompous and oppressive kings as in Egypt and Babylon. The Oera Linda manuscript could not have been more precious a find, had it been written on leaves of gold.

But why must you read this book and why is it so important that the laws and histories contained herein be well known? It is because they demonstrate that the Christianity which is the chief religion of the West and of Westernized people is very much rooted in the West itself and not strictly of Jewish origin. Christians need not think that they were granted the very knowledge of God by a people whose practice is nonetheless usually contrary to their own!

The stone which the builders refused is become the headstone of the corner. -Psalm 118:22

Now ,at long last, a limited quantity of the Pierce translation of The Oera Linda Book is available for just $12.00 U.S. plus $2.00 shipping and handling in the USA and Puerto Rico, $2.20 in Canada, $3.30 in other countries. Send your check or money order, payable to Frank H. Pierce IV, to: Oera Linda Book c/o Frank H. Pierce IV, 1008 Schindler Drive, Silver Spring MD 20903 USA.